Altruist Media aims to create the highest quality of authentic, creative, and solutions-based youth journalism designed to help youth make active change. We strive to build the largest network of youth journalists and activists; a place for people to communicate, collaborate, and contribute to social causes and charitable organizations.
To do so, we embrace a set of values and principles within the organization and without. These values, while a simple guideline, do not encapsulate the long list of empathetic and equitable behaviours that are expected from members within our community!
<aside> 🎖️ Independence A key element of grassroots journalism is that it functions independently of institutional influence. We uphold that as a guiding principle in our work, ensuring that at every step of the media production journey, we rid ourselves of any compromising institutional influence that can otherwise obscure the real stories we want to share.
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<aside> 🎖️ Vigilance/Commitment to Truth Media requires vigilance and courage in the face of powerful institutions and people, while staying conscious of one’s own safety and security. Our journalism is centered on the grassroots stories of people living under certain conditions and how they relate to broader academic concepts.
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<aside> 🎖️ Integrity In a world of clickbait, paywalls, and 'fake news', Altruist Media brings detailed journalism to an arid media landscape. By having a clear and transparent set of Editorial Principles, readers can have an understanding of how we write, why we write a certain way, and how we uphold ethical practices within our reporting.
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<aside> 🎖️ Diversity With the curious and inquisitive nature of the global youth, Altruist Media promotes innovation and diversity in media. We strive to tell stories from the grassroots. We believe that without an adequate amount of honest, community-driven reporting, our society falls by the wayside, having ignored the diverse and unique voices that bind us as humans.
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<aside> 🎖️ Justice Diversity and a code of ethics mean nothing, if they aren’t followed up by concrete actions and systemic change. Our focus on the intersection between the academic world and the practical world brings with it an emphasis on critical theory and justice. We strive to represent all sides of an issues fairly and equally at all times.
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A key question many ask when viewing our organization is:
“What makes your journalism unique, besides it’s grassroots system?”
That is an excellent question, and an easy one to answer! It’s our method and presentation that is unique! Our journalism is driven by peer-reviewed academic concepts and arguments that can help guide our understanding of global politics and culture.
From simplifying Neo-Gramscian International Relations to explaining p53 pathways in the context of cancer therapeutics, our goal is to demystify academic concepts and apply them to our day-to-day vocabulary and discourse on global issues. By doing this, we encourage greater knowledge of expert-level understanding of complex global issues.
While we are in no way experts in these fields (like most journalists), we conduct thorough research and attempt to reach out to as many experts as possible in order to present out analysis of global issues as accurate as possible. Our goal is to merge the standardized processes in academic journal writing with the fluidity and application-based process of journalism.
We apply a simple overarching system/hierarchy in our writing:
While this is the main mode of writing, we will never restrict our content to a specific form of article organization/structure.
Our primary perspective is usually from the perspective of Critical Theorists with an explicit focus on Praxis, but we welcome varying perspectives that uphold our1.2 Ethos and Values, as long as it is verified through our editing process and accepted during an interview process or any individual writing project.